I am getting a lot of emails to summarize the announcements that we made at IMPACT 2008! So what I decided to do after a great dinner last night with our IBM friends in the North End of Boston, was to do a blog for each of our six announcements!

The first one I would like to highlight is the announement on our IBM BPM Suite with events capability.

Just a few facts before we get into the announcement. Fact: The BPM Market is predicted to grow over 35% CAGR to $6B by 2011 (Forrester Research)Fact: IBM is the Marketshare leader in BPMS (Gartner Dataquest)Fact: IBM is rated a leader in more Magic Quadrants and Waves than any other vendor (six), including: BPMS (Gartner), Business Process Analysis (Gartner), Integration-Centric BPMS (Forrester), Document-Centric BPMS (Forrester), Human-Centric BPMS for Banking/Financial Markets (Forrester); and Human-Centric BPMS for Insurance (Forrester).

In fact, IBM was first to market with an integrated BPM/SOA offering (Bruce Silver Associates/Bloor Research)Fact: IBM is the recognized "clear" leader in Content-Centric BPMS (Forrester)

These announcements at IMPACT took a another step ahead for our client's value -- around our announcement of the BPM Suite. Accordining to Wikipedia, a suite is "a collection of computer programs, usually application software and programming software of related functionality, often sharing a more-or-less common user interface and some ability to smoothly exchange data with each other." -Wikipedia

(By the way did you guys see Jimmy Wales speak at IMPACT? He was amazing!) IBM's BPM Suite is a comprehensive set of role-based, SOA-enabled product capabilities that provide customers with the ability to continuously optimize processes, and adapt processes rapidly to changing needs.

The suite contains key functionality from across IBM to control and manage business processes across their lifecycle, with an emphasis on business user empowerment and greater collaboration across multiple roles within a client's organization

IBM’s BPM Suite combines product capabilities from across IBM Software Group that match the way customers purchase, implement, and upgrade BPM software while protecting and reusing their existing IT investments.

To make it easier for customers to get started with BPM, we’ve created Starter Sets for the IBM BPM Suite. The IBM BPM Suite includes a choice of two starter sets – Dynamic Business Processes Set and Content-Aware Processes Set. Starter sets are packaged offerings and are designed to address key customer scenarios.

Each starter set contains tools to model, deploy and monitor core business processes. The suite also offers a number of optional extended-value offerings to enhance and advance overall capabilities.

The starter set for Dynamic Business Processes supports process optimization across heterogeneous, dynamic, transaction-rich environments, requiring enterprise-wide integration capabilities and SOA. This starter set is best for processes that require choreography across multiple divisions, departments or applications and which may involve higher frequencies of change. Products include WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere Business Services Fabric and WebSphere Business Monitor.

The starter set for Content-Aware Processes supports process optimization where content is core to your processes or integrated compliance requirements exist. This starter set is best for processes that require the content object to be managed as the item of work utilizing content repository services (document management, versioning, imaging, etc) that you expect in a world class enterprise content management system. Products for this starter set include FileNet Business Process Manager, FileNet Business Activity Monitor, FileNet P8 eForms, and FileNet Business Process Framework.Extended value offerings are capabilities that augment the foundational starter sets and regardless of which starter set you choose, you can leverage additional capabilities in areas such as events, rules, and analytics. Specifically, the extended value offerings include: Business event processing (through WebSphere Business Events), Asset repositories for BPM (with Rational Asset Manager and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository), Collaboration (with WebSphere Business Modeler Publishing Edition, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, and plug-ins for Sametime), and Advanced analytics (with Cognos).

In addition, pre-built industry-specific solution accelerators and assets based on industry best practices are available (these include the Process Automation Accelerator for Portal, and the Dashboard Accelerator for Portal, along with Industry Content Packs and Industry Models).

Details on Suite and Starter Set packaging, pricing and support available in Q2 2008

Today was truly an incredible day at IMPACT! I arrived this morning at the MGM Boxing Arena to learn that we had 6,000 people in attendance at the conference. This morning's session was a chance for us to connect with our customers, partners, analysts and press. It's hard to believe that this is only the second annual IMPACT conference. The sheer volume of customers has grown by nearly 50 percent in the past year. Indeed, interest in SOA among companies of all sizes in all industries continues to rise at an increasingly rapid pace.

I want to share with all of you, some of the exciting news we talked about today.

The Smart SOA Social Network was of particular interest to attendees. The concept of the network is to bring together a like-minded, global community of thought leaders, information technology (IT) and business professionals, university professors and students, and other interested parties through both online and in-person forums designed to help members build skills and share best practices.

The IBM SOA social network is open to any customers, partners, academics and interested parties aiming to advance and share SOA knowledge and best practices. Membership is free and not restricted to the IBM community.

Please join us on the Network and share you thoughts & experiences.

And don't forget to join this week's SOA JAM. We want to hear from you!